Thursday, July 19, 2018

Conservation president's legacy ours to enjoy -- July 19, 2018 column

By MARSHA MERCER

It’s hard to escape distrust of the
nation’s capital -- even at a rodeo in a little town in South Dakota.

I was learning about calf roping and
steer wrestling from a former rodeo prize-winner – he had the big, silver belt
buckle to prove it -- until he asked where I was from. I told him I live in the
Washington area.

I defended my media colleagues but knew
we’d be better off talking about bull riding in the ring than about bull
slinging in Washington.

I wasn’t surprised on my trip around
the Dakotas that Trump is popular, but I found it ironic he’s popular among
people who also revere a very different president.

Theodore Roosevelt is close to being
a native son of North Dakota. He was an intellectual, a voracious reader,
prolific author and historian, a believer in physical activity and the great
outdoors. He was our conservation president. And he loathed incivility.

Roosevelt was vice president when he
first used the proverb “Speak softly and carry a big stick” in a speech in 1901.

“If a man continually blusters, if
he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble; and neither will
speaking softly avail, if back of the softness there does not lie strength,
power,” he said.

Four days later, President William
McKinley was shot, and Roosevelt soon became president.

Long before that, though, Roosevelt,
at age 24, made the long train trip to the Dakota Territory for the first time
in 1883. He wanted to hunt bison before they became extinct.

Enchanted with the land and the life,
he bought an interest in a ranch during the trip.

The next year, he returned to the
wild, vast, silent country for solace after he suffered heartbreaking loss. His
wife, who had given birth to their first child just two days earlier, and his
mother died hours apart on Valentine’s Day in the same house in New York.

In his
diary that day, he wrote a large X and only one sentence: “The light has gone
out of my life.”

He raised cattle on the Little
Missouri River, enjoying “the strenuous life” alongside cowboys he admired for
their strength, work ethic and character. You can see the rugged North Dakota
badlands much as he did by visiting Theodore Roosevelt National Park,
established in 1947 to honor the 26th president.

He used whatever spare time he had to
sit in his rocking chair and read and write history. Then drought and a blizzard
decimated his herd in 1886, and he went back East.

But his experiences in North Dakota
changed him for good. His exposure to those cowboys led to an appreciation for
the common man that would serve him well in politics and the White House.

“I have always said I never would
have been President if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota,” Roosevelt
wrote.

The New Yorker who went west to hunt
bison before they vanished from the West also developed something else in those
wild, open spaces. Long a student of animals, he became outspoken in his desire
to save them.

“The extermination of the buffalo
has been a veritable tragedy of the animal world,” he wrote.

He signed the American Antiquities
Act of 1906 and protected about 230 million acres of public lands –
establishing five national parks, 18 national monuments, including the Grand
Canyon, 51 bird reserves, four national game preserves and 150 national
forests.

Since then, 16 presidents of both
parties have used the act to enlarge the nation’s store of protected lands. Critics,
however, say the presidential power to restrict land is too great. Trump is rolling
back designations President Barrack Obama made under the act.

One can only wonder what the originator
of the Bully Pulpit would think of that.